Joanna Brooks is an award-winning scholar of religion and American
culture. She covers Mormonism, faith, and politics as a senior
correspondent for Religion Dispatches. In 2011 Politico named her one of the “50 Politicos to Watch.” Her new book is The Book of Mormon Girl: Stories from an American Faith.
She and Sally Steenland talk about the Mormon faith and politics,
political coverage of religion, history of the Mormon Church, and the
progressive Mormon tradition.

Sally Steenland: The Mormon faith is unfamiliar to millions of
Americans, so there is a fair amount of conjecture, suspicion, and
stereotyping about Mormonism. If you could tell people one or two
important things about the faith, what would they be?

Joanna Brooks: The first thing is that Mormons know how to
walk in two worlds. Like members of any orthodox faith or insular
culture, they invest in relationships with other Mormons and participate
in religious practices open only to their faith, yet know how to
balance this with an involvement in broader American society. Sometimes
there's a tendency to sensationalize or even sinisterize aspects of
Mormon practice that remain closed to non-Mormons such as Mormon temple
rituals or ceremonies. But Mormons know how to balance an inner world
and an outer world and how to negotiate the two pretty gracefully.

The second thing is that Mormonism is a dynamic faith. Even among
orthodox believers, there's a sense that God continues to speak, that
more knowledge and revelation are forthcoming. That means the church is
capable of change. We see that in the history of race in the Mormon
church. Many are aware that people of African descent did not have
access to lay priesthood and participation in temple worship until 1978,
which is a very long time—far too long. But since the church extended
full participation and the church leadership changed policy, the church
has made tremendous strides toward incorporating people of color,
reaching out to people of African descent. The changes haven’t always
been led by people at the top, but there is dynamism within the faith.

SS: What you said about people knowing how to walk in both worlds sounds true for a lot of faith traditions.

JB: Absolutely. It’s true particularly of the role of secrecy
and how much misunderstanding that can generate. My husband is an
anthropologist who works in Native American communities. When we go into
their communities, we’re not allowed to go into kivas in Pueblo
societies. There are places we can’t go out of respect for the religious
culture. Yet Native Americans know how to interact in mainstream
American society and balance their ritual and religious obligation with
their mainstream identities. The same can be said of Mormons.

SS: Let’s talk about attitudes toward Mormons as reflected in
research polls. Four in 10 voters tell pollsters they’d be uncomfortable
with a Mormon president. Yet when it comes to actual voting in the
Republican primaries so far, Mitt Romney, the Mormon candidate, has
carried the evangelical vote in some states but not others. Are polls a
reliable indicator of people’s voting behavior or are there dynamics the
polls are not capturing?

JB: I find the polls fascinating. And I follow them pretty
closely. But I don’t think we have a complete body of data yet. I would
love to see someone ask a follow-up question: “Why are you uncomfortable
with a Mormon president?” I think there’s a diversity of reasons for
individual voters’ discomfort. Voters who tend to be more liberal are
going to know the church’s record on LGBT rights, its historic
antifeminism, and might think, “If he’s Mormon, he’s going to be
conservative, and I’m not voting for a conservative. Period.”

Voters on the right will have different concerns. I’d love to see
their reasons fleshed out, since conservative voters should be aligned
with most Mormon candidates on ideological grounds. Maybe it’s something
they heard at church, or it’s their perception of Mormons as a closed
society, or it could have to do with polygamy. I don’t think we have a
good read yet on what Mormonism means to the American people as a whole.

SS: That’s a good point because polls do show that some liberal
people, who you would think wouldn’t have a religious test for office,
express hesitation about voting for a Mormon. Maybe they don’t object to
doctrines of the faith, but instead to the religion potentially being a
proxy for political conservatism.

JB: Right. And Romney is not an unflawed candidate. Sometimes I
sense that Mormonism stands as a proxy for his inability to connect
with everyday voters. He doesn’t give off that populist vibe. He doesn’t
have the common touch that we love in our politicians. There are all
sorts of qualms people have, and the readiest name for them is
Mormonism.

SS: And when you’re the only candidate representing your faith,
gender, or race, you carry the weight of the entire tradition. People
see you and say, “You stand for the whole.”

JB: Four years ago pollsters asked, "Are you comfortable
voting for an African American president?" There was this notion that
people might say they were comfortable, but when they went into the
privacy of the voting booth, they wouldn’t pull the lever for Obama. Yet
that didn’t materialize in a documentable way.

I suspect that if you gave someone in an anonymous phone poll the
right to tacitly approve or disapprove of an unfamiliar American
minority group, they might say, "Yeah. I don't like the Mormons so much.
I don't know why." Perhaps every American minority group goes through
this moment when the nation grapples with, "Who are these people? What
do they want?" And then people go on and make fairly predictable
political decisions anyway. I think we're having that moment.

SS: When the group is unfamiliar, people ask, “Are they going to
take over? Are they going to obey somebody else instead of the
Constitution?”

JB: I don’t think there’s anything about Mitt Romney's
political career up to this point that suggests that he's weighted by
some wild visionary prophetic impulse.

SS: The man loves to sing patriotic songs, for heaven’s sakes.

JB: I know, he’s extremely careful. He’s carefully managed and
highly technocratic. That reality doesn’t reflect the everyday concerns
we hear, much like the concerns surrounding President John F. Kennedy
that he’d obey the pope. Some people just don't like the idea that a
Mormon prophet might have the ear of the president.

SS: I'm glad you brought up Kennedy because people have compared
him and Romney. When Kennedy ran for office in 1960, there was a lot of
suspicion toward the Catholic faith. People thought Catholics wanted to
take over the world and there’d be a phone on his desk that went
straight to Rome. Romney is facing some similar fears. When you look at
1960 and 2012, much has changed. But what's the same in terms of
religious intolerance and what's different?

JB: My favorite take on the comparison between Catholics,
Mormonism, and the presidency is from my friend Jana Riess who wrote a
piece for The Washington Post a few weeks ago saying that Romney
isn't comparable to Kennedy in 1960. Romney is more comparable to the
1928 presidential candidate Al Smith because Romney is really one of the
first.

There have been other church members who have run for president—about
14 of them in fact—including church founder Joseph Smith more than a
century ago. But Romney is the first serious contender on a national
ticket. So the environment he’s encountering is much more like the one
Al Smith encountered in the 1920s when anti-Catholicism was much more
widespread. So maybe in 40 years we'll have a Mormon candidate to
compare to JFK.

SS: Maybe your children?

JB: Well they're girls, so that would be great.

SS: The first female Mormon president!

JB: Exactly.

SS: Public attitudes towards Mormonism, Romney, and the campaign
are shaped in part by the press. In your writing and speaking, you've
criticized some of their coverage. Can you talk about that? And what
would you like to see?

JB: The press has such a broad meaning. There's the
professional journalist press, and with every election cycle, there’s an
ever-broader array of social media, blogs, and online publications that
aren’t journalistic in nature and play by perhaps fewer rules when it
comes to covering religion. Many have less substance regarding religion,
especially where it intersects with politics.

When I think about how the national papers of record are covering Mormonism, there’s a lot to be praised. The Washington Post
has done an excellent job covering issues that pertain to the faith
community. For example, they covered Romney's time as a bishop—a local
lay clerical leader—which is a position that tens of thousands of men
around the world hold at one time. They interviewed people with whom he
served and developed a multidimensional picture of his personality as a
faith leader. They included voices of Mormon feminists who interacted
with Romney, and they didn’t sensationalize the issues. They humanized
the role of the bishop in the Mormon community. It was a really
wonderful piece.

In the last few days there was a piece on the op-ed page of The Washington Post
by a woman who's a former Mormon and has written about challenges the
church faces in managing controversial aspects of its history. In the
same pages they've had Michael Otterson, a PR spokesperson for the
church. There have been a range of Mormon voices talking in ways that
reveal the humanity and inner dynamics of Mormon people.

But I've seen instances that have concerned me. Sometimes folks make
their way onto the opinion pages who might have marginal knowledge of
Mormonism, yet merit quite a few column inches riffing off the less
savory facts about our tradition and applying it to the presidential
race. We've seen this in reputable papers.

There are many experts on Mormonism. There are scholars and
articulate people, some of them members of the church, some of them not,
teaching in places like Vanderbilt University, the University of North
Carolina at Chapel Hill, and the University of Pennsylvania, who should
be brought into the national conversation. It concerns me when the
national conversation about us takes place as if we’re not in the room
watching it all unfold. It would be nice for the people who know our
tradition best to be included in the conversation. They don’t have to be
Mormon people. There are wonderful experts out there who aren’t members
of the church, and it’d be great to see them getting column inches too.

SS: In 2008 the Mormon church contributed heavily to the
Proposition 8 campaign in California that would prohibit same-sex
marriage. That kind of antigay activism shapes the public image of the
church.

JB: I think it’s important to be candid and fact-oriented when
it comes to Mormonism’s historical record. We have to acknowledge that
this is a church that’s been on-record both in terms of volunteer hours
and money—from individual members and from the institution itself—to
stop gay marriage not only in California but in Alaska, Hawaii, Maine,
Arizona, and other states.

In the 1970s and ‘80s, the church gave resources and muscle to
defeating the Equal Rights Amendment. These are parts of Mormon history.
But it helps to understand the institutional culture of the church. The
church doesn't work by committee; there is a chain of command. It is a
centralized organization and highly bureaucratic. The decision-makers at
the top tend to have been in service a long time. So this is a
tradition that moves very slowly, and one in which there might be
disagreement between younger folks and the leadership in Salt Lake
City—the church’s headquarters. This is a culture that prioritizes
respect for leaders, obedience, and sacrifice.

So there is always a complicated story going on within Mormonism
about how newness emerges and where it comes from. I actually think
we've been seeing a lot of movement on the ground in terms of acceptance
and compassion for LGBT people within our own community. But in many
respects, the emotion animating that comes from members themselves.
People are doing documentaries, starting websites, producing Mormon "It
Gets Better" videos, and looking after LGBT people in their own
communities who are facing a hard time. The Internet has been really
important for connecting progressive elements of Mormonism.

SS: When you talk about the Mormon faith, you say that this is a
relatively recent religion that was born in America. You call it "an
innovative branch of Protestantism.” What do you mean by that? What is
some of the baggage that comes with being a more historically recent
religion? And what do you mean by innovation?

JB: Let's start with the question of innovation, for a little
history lesson. Some people don't view Mormonism technically as a
Protestant faith. I'd characterize it as Protestant because its roots
are in Protestantism. Joseph Smith observed and participated in the
Second Great Awakening, an era in American history with a tremendous
amount of religious upheaval. There was an impulse to cast off older
denominational ideas and experience a more primal encounter with the
power of God in the Christian tradition. It was almost a fundamentalist
turn in the early 19th century.

Many faiths emerged from that movement with the impulse to restore
the church to its original simplicity and kept their message quite
simple. But Mormonism, as it moved west and over the career of Joseph
Smith, innovated new layers of belief, doctrine, and practice. That
innovation starts with the Book of Mormon itself. Joseph Smith's grand
contribution to the founding of Mormonism was the production of the
second book of scripture that stands alongside the Bible. Again, this
runs counter to the basic impulses of Protestantism, which have been,
especially in its fundamentalist strains, about restoring original
simplicity between the soul and God unmediated by churches.

The production of the second book of scripture as an elaboration of
sacred stories is a pretty radical move in the history of American
religion. And this went forth, including innovated temple ceremonies and
innovated theologies about heaven and polygamy. In Mormonism there are
basic Protestant beliefs in the divinity of Jesus Christ and his paying
for the sins of the world. That is all present but there are other
layers on top of it.

Our newness translates often into a continuing sense of the literal
presence of the divine. Mormons believe that God appeared to Joseph
Smith. That sense of the divine is very close. The belief that
revelation didn't stop with the Old Testament but continues in human
life today is pretty distinctive and is taken pretty literally in
Mormonism.

SS: Are there illustrations of that today, where someone gets a divine visitation, an inspiration, or new interpretations?

JB: That's a fascinating question because close observers of
the culture note that the rate of newness has slowed dramatically in
Mormonism. People who fear that a Mormon prophet might tell a President
Romney to do something dramatic should probably tune in and watch what
actually happens at Mormon conferences where church leaders speak twice a
year. It's all on the Internet. Notice how very conservative most of
the messages are: "pray," "be good to your families," "be honest in your
dealings,” “avoid pornography"—these are the messages that Mormon
prophets are delivering today.

There are some who wonder where the newness has gone. On the other
hand Mormon people are alive to the possibility of change. Mormons tend
to be helpful and optimistic, to believe things are going to work out.
If things are not clear or right, or are difficult, there is more light
and knowledge ahead. This can contribute to the sense of hopefulness in
the Mormon tradition even when change is slow.

SS: If you look at Mormonism as a whole, it seems to be a pretty
successful demographic. I imagine that change and innovation could rock
the boat and threaten stability and success.

JB: Yet I think there are times when we see the older, more
theocratic sense of Mormonism reassert itself—especially in a
willingness to stand apart from the mainstream. Prop 8 was not an easy
fight for Mormon people. I say that as someone who, personally, out of
conscience, did not vote for Proposition 8. But I had close friends and
family members who felt obliged by faith to support it.

The stance they took was not easy. It was an extremely contentious
campaign. There are times when Mormons will put themselves against the
mainstream on certain issues. They are still willing to do hard things
and stand out and be different.

In terms of demographics this should be said: There is a perception
that all Mormons are like Romney, or like J.W. Marriott, chairman and
CEO of Marriott International. But we really aren't. Statistics put our
income in the middle bracket—higher than evangelicals, lower than
Hindus, Jews, and Episcopalians. Also the global Mormon church is very
different than it is in the United States. More than half the membership
now lives outside the United States. To talk about Mormons in a global
sense, those perceptions just don't apply.

SS: I'm glad you brought that up. Are Mormons equally distributed
around the world, or are there pockets of density the way there are in
the United States?

JB: There was a large amount of missionary work in South
America in the 1970s and 80s, so there are a lot of members in Brazil,
Chile, and Mexico, along with a broad distribution across Central and
South America. There are strong pockets in the Philippines, Japan, and
the South Pacific—like a third of Tonga and a third of Samoa. There is a
strong and distinctive Polynesian Mormon culture. Growth right now in
Africa is rapid. So there is both broad distribution and distinct
pockets.

SS: I want to go back to politics and the campaign. As we said,
polls show some discomfort voting for a Mormon president, but when you
push that bit, a number of conservatives say, "If Romney is the nominee,
I’ll vote for him because I have a much stronger desire to defeat
President Obama."

JB: Right. I think partisanship is stronger than sectarianism
in this country. If you look at the potential for a depressed turnout in
2012, if the contest is Romney versus Obama, it may be a depressed
turnout anyway. There are evangelical voters who will insist on staying
home so as not to vote for Romney.

SS: I have to interrupt. Are you saying the voters will be depressed? Or that they'll be fewer of them?

JB: Fewer. But maybe depressed too. It's tough sledding out
there. It may be tough to get 2008 voters back to the polls. There was
something magical in 2008 that may be hard to capture after the Great
Recession.

SS: We've talked about the history of the church, politics, and
more. Let's zoom in on you. You grew up a Mormon and you are still a
Mormon. Can you tell us why?

JB: I describe myself as a Mormon by ancestry, by upbringing,
but also by affiliation and conviction. I have had the opportunity to
step back and examine the beliefs I was raised with, evaluate them, and
make adult choices from a place of careful consideration. Even after a
great deal of education and searching, Mormonism has remained my
spiritual lexicon, my vocabulary, my mother tongue. I find it a
challenging tradition, a rich tradition, a robustly imaginative
tradition, inspiring, and difficult all at the same time. But I feel a
great sense of purpose as a Mormon progressive especially when I work
with other Mormon progressives to help create more capacity in our
tradition for progressive thought and to honor the progressive potential
in Mormon theology and the sacrifices our ancestors made.

I think about my own pioneer ancestors: My grandmother’s grandmother
crossed the plains when she was a very small child. I think about people
who were willing to give up everything they knew for a spiritual quest
and the hope they had for building a better world. It has carried me
through and shaped my progressive politics. I feel good about that
legacy and it's one that I want to share with my children. It's a
beautiful American story that I’m glad to be a part of and happy to pass
down.

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